﻿﻿﻿Hook﻿﻿﻿

﻿(Circa 2001)﻿

I’m sure that doing the review of an old videogame based on a bad movie has to be rewarding. That’s why I’m looking forward to it about as much as a punctured lung. I don’t remember much about it, only that I didn’t like it. Just like the movie. But unlike the movie, I’m once again willing to subject myself to this kind of torture. The game starts with a father and his two kids standing on a balcony, not looking or sounding anything like their characters in the movie. They don’t have any mouths, so I guess they’re communicating telepathically. The kids start asking a few harmless questions like, “Daddy, is Grandma Wendy the real Wendy?” Then Jack says, innocently, “Then dad, is Peter Pan’s events a made-up story?” Just like how I talked at his age. I admit it’s kind of an odd thing to say, but it’s no excuse for what happens next. For some reason, Peter just blows up at them. He’s all, “MAGGIE, THAT’S RIDICULOUS! JACK, STOP! THERE WAS NO ADVENTURE AND THERE NEVER WILL BE!!!” Fine, take away your kids fantasies. Why don’t you just tell them Santa’s not real too, asshole. In fact, tell them the reason they didn’t find money under their pillow last night is because you beat up the Tooth Fairy for breaking an entering. And for being a fag. Don’t take it out on your kids just because you have amnesia, crazy. Then he says, “Come on now, let’s hop in bed.” I guess no one including Peter was listening, because for about 10 seconds, nobody moves a muscle. They just stand there, staring at each other in total silence. Not exactly the enthusiastic “hop” into bed you would expect. Then a ship floats by the moon when no one is looking. It then shows the ship close up in a choppy, fuzzy video. The fact that the entire thing has no sound doesn’t help the quality any. Then Hook leaves a ransom note, indicating that he took Jack and Maggie kicking and screaming onto his flying pirate ship. Meanwhile, Peter, who is still standing in the windowsill, somehow managed to miss the whole damn thing. He seems to think his kids are playing a trick on him. I suppose that’s believable. Any 10-year-old could have easily forged the professional calligraphy of the ransom note.

"Those kids of mine... They always throw me for a loop!" -Peter, Dumbass.

Then he meets Tinkerbell, who sounds hilariously just like Miss Piggy. And he’s so shocked, he slowly jumps three feet into the air. I think her most nonsensical line is “You’ve grown up. You’re still the same old Peter.” I always thought of the “same old Peter” as that guy who never grows up. This is the worst goddamn voice acting I’ve ever heard. From Peter’s monotone “whoa what who are you” (note the intentional lack of punctuation) to Tinkerpiggy’s painful, inappropriately timed sigh, which sounds like she’s faking an orgasm mid-sentence. Maybe she has Tourette’s. I’m not kidding. The voice acting is so bad, it sounds like the guy who does Peter’s voice is the same one doing TINKERBELL. Couldn’t they have just used sound clips from the movie? That would have made things easier for everybody, including all two voice actors, but most importantly, ME, and my screaming, dying ears. Peter is reluctant to go, so eventually, he and Tink go into the house and the next thing you know, Tinkerbell is dragging an unconscious Peter off to Neverland. How the hell did that happen? She’s like the size of his fist and she overpowered him? He could STEP on her for fuck’s sake! I guess she was getting even for the tooth fairy. That intro alone tells me I’m headed for disaster but I continue anyway. Speaking of, in the game, you have unlimited continues. And since you start back at the beginning of the level every time you die, having unlimited continues is like having unlimited lives. So I’m not really sure why they even bother to keep track of lives. Also, everything moves in slow motion. It’s REALLY annoying. It takes like 10 seconds to jump. So that took forever. Finally, at the beginning of the first level, Tink uses her magic powers to dress Peter like a homo to prove to the Lost Boys that he is Peter Pan. I’m not sure how that plan is supposed to work, but I think she just wanted to see Peter in short-shorts. She also makes him skinny. Basically he looks like a completely different person. I think she really just switched them in a cloud of fairy dust when no one could see them. Once you beat the first level you have to listen to the all the kids you just beat up chant, “He’s the Pan!” for about a minute. Tinkerbell suggests that Peter go find his kids now, but instead, he just stands around like he’s completely forgotten he has kids and is wondering what the hell she’s talking about. The third level has the worst enemies ever. They have a dork rolling on a barrel, and a guy who throws boulders that magically roll uphill. And you get a sword that shoots Ryu’s fireball. It’s also about a minute long, not difficult, and doesn’t even have a boss. The lack of difficulty is made up for in the fourth level. There, you have tigers that somehow freeze your molecules with sonic wave vibrations when they roar. Then there’s a part where you are in the ocean with one of your mermaid friends as a helper. But I think she has Down’s syndrome, because all she really does is push you into bombs. And the boss is an evil turdspore.

How Sega created characters for this game.

After the fourth level, there’s really not anything different enough to be worth commenting on. It’s basically the same enemies only in different spots, and some of them now have shields or different weapons. Except in the eighth level, there are skeletons whose design was stolen from Mario 3 or a Castlevania game: you hit them, they collapse into a pile, and then get back up. The first new enemy in 4 levels, and they didn’t even come up with the idea on their own. Goddamn it, my Sega CD is messed up. I think by the ninth level, the machine hated the game as much as I did. So to spice things up a bit, it decided to scramble the pointless map it shows at the beginning of each level. I guess now I should expect this kind of thing to happen at least once with every game I review. I’m sure glad my Sega CD is just manic-depressive instead of homicidal. Otherwise, I’d be afraid it would eject the game so hard, it would decapitate me for ever inserting the game into its disk drive. I wouldn’t blame the system, though, for two reasons: one, because I’d be dead, and two, because I’d probably do the same thing if I were it. At the end of level ten, you get to fight the dreaded Hook. I had 0 lives left and one hit could have killed me. ‘Oh piss-buckets!’ I thought. So with no strategy at all, I hit Hook about five times and he fell off the ship. I was like, “WHAT THE FUCK?? Why the hell did they put the easiest boss at the end of the game?” Peter could have had his blade dangerously attached to his miniature penis and still beaten the guy. Then you get to see a short scene involving Peter untying his kids. During this scene, an unimportant character from the first level says something like “Congratulations! You defeated Hook!” Hook sees this as a good time to throw a sword through the guy’s chest. Afterwards, instead of screaming in immense pain, or even saying, “Ow, there’s a sword in my chest,” he says something that I’ve already forgotten, so it probably wasn’t very meaningful.

Seriously, this game isn't even worth the screenshots, so here's this. Btw, that's my elbow, pervert.

As luck would have it, you get to fight Hook again. Only this time, he’s actually difficult and he has a bionic arm. I don’t remember the movie, but I think they left the bionic arm out of the final cut. Once you beat Hook, a crocodile statue retartedly falls on him and explodes. Later, Peter tells his kids to fly home while saying stupid shit like, “Don’t worry about me, I’m Peter Pan!” Then, in another horrible video sequence, you can see what almost looks like Jack and Maggie flying away from the island. But to me, it looks more like an amoeba taking a shit. Then the credits start rolling. Although not as disappointing as the credits of Sewer Shark, they do have one major flaw. After all the great John Williams music throughout the game, they didn’t even play ANY during the credits. It’s like five minutes of aggravating silence. And after that, they still aren’t done torturing you with bad voice acting and terrible video quality. In the last scene, Tink says, lustfully, “Oh Peter! That was FUN!” It really made me wonder what I missed while the credits were rolling, and how minute Peter’s peter would have to be in order to execute what I was thinking without exploding Tinkerbell. Then Peter says, while oddly changing colors, “Life is the greatest adventure of all.” Then, in an outburst of wrong colors, you see what I hardly recognized as Captain Hook’s hook. Couldn’t they have just used a picture of the hook instead of instead of trying even harder to cause epilepsy than the Sega CD itself? I’m already almost blind just from thinking about the whole Tinkerbell sex thing, they don’t have to make it worse with a shitty video.

RATING (OUT OF 10)

GRAPHICS: 6 The video quality looks like a reel of film that somebody vomited on, the characters don’t look anything like they’re supposed to, and Peter looks like a homo.SOUND: 3 I loved the music. It was the only good thing to come from this game. But all they did was steal it from the movie, so I took points off for lack of effort. You can’t cut corners in one of my reviews, bitch. Plus, not having music during the credits was sheer stupidity. Also, the voice acting deserved about -12, so I really shouldn’t have given it a rating any higher than 0. Oh well.PLAY CONTROL: 5 The button you hold down in order to run is the attack button. So you can’t run and attack someone at the same time, no matter how necessary it may be. Come to think of it, running doesn’t help much anyway. It takes too long to build up speed, and even at top speed, you only run as fast as Mario WALKS. FUN: 5 Not the worst, but not really worth playing. Or buying. Or looking at. Or being made. It’s about as fun as watching the booger I found on the back of the instruction booklet, generously provided by the seller, or his younger sibling.

OVERALL RATING: 4.5

A very mediocre and booger-coated game, Hook will now take part in a permanent hibernation in my drawer. Unless I decide to set it on fire and throw it at someone I don’t like.

Well it was a short game, but it left me with many things I’m sure not to forget. Like the time I wasted playing it, this review, a booger, the thought of Peter having sex with Tinkerbell, and epilepsy. I guess the best thing I can say about this game is something I read off a bathroom wall: “Captain Hook died from jock-itch!!”